The performing artist (the "real" one) doesn't have a preference. He just wants the listeners to feel happy.
The product manager has an agenda: He wants the "selling" sound.
The man at the mixing desk does, what he is comfortable with, or what is his "hallmark".
So where should the "good" sound come from???

The performing artist (the "real" one) doesn't have a preference. He just wants the listeners to feel happy.
The product manager has an agenda: He wants the "selling" sound.
The man at the mixing desk does, what he is comfortable with, or what is his "hallmark".
So where should the "good" sound come from???

But the miss in the Orion (and to a lesser, but still significant extent the NaO II) was because, IMO, SL was worried about holding constant directivity at the wrong end of the frequency scale.

There's rather more to it than that, I think. In the original ORION design SL targets constant power response more than constant directivity (which is a means, not an end). He wanted to avoid baffle step, and that led to dipole bass "all the way down". He already knew (from previous designs) that dipole bass sounds better (more natural) down to and well below the Schroder frequency (which is not itself a "fixed" number but depends on the listening room). He wanted to avoid a separate (sub) woofer, and the dipole bass unit integrates better with the rest of the speaker when co-located.

At the MT transition the original incarnation handled the transition reasonably well from a power response perspective, with the tweeter's "bloom" to the sides balancing the loss of the dipole rear lobe. That worked surprisingly well in many rooms, and I regard the single tweeter ORION as the most successful of the ORION variants overall because of that. It is still a great sounding (one of the best you can own) speaker, and all the "open baffle" benefits are still there as well.

What was not properly accounted for, and what became the impetus for the later (with rear tweeter) variants, and ultimately LX521, was the effect of the change of direction of first reflections on the perception of "localization" and "spaciousness" . . . what SL came to call the "Audio Scene". Even many of us who challenged the "not dipole all the way up" character of the design did not, to my recollection, articulate the "why" of that objection particularly well. Adding the rear tweeter to ORION only partially corrected the directionality of the reflected field problem, and it brought back the power response problem that the original ORION had avoided, and raised equalization issues that led to unending, and never completely successful, "fixes". Correcting that simply could not be accomplished in a 3-way design, and however soon and however badly SL wanted to change we can't know . . . what we do know (and he has acknowledged) is that the "legacy effect" delayed his switch to 4-way, and to some extent colored the design of LX521 (the hybrid crossover). My personal feeling is that it would have come much sooner had it not been for the "commercialization" of the ORION design and the contractual (and other) obligations that came with that.

For many reasons (the "legacy effect" of the existing 3-way crossover being just one of several) the LX521 is perhaps better understood as a 3-way design with a "compound midrange" driver. Even the baffle design is driven by the objective of making the two mid drivers behave as one. Thus the superlative midrange behavior of LX521 may be as much a result (and serendipitous benefit) of legacy as of initial intent . . . I think it remains to be seen whether the more conventional 4-way efforts (as I'm doing with my "clone" and you have done with Note) will work as well. No reason it shouldn't, I keep telling myself . . .

While the Orion and NaO II are similar the blooming, which is eliminated in the Note and Note II, is very significant and is part of the reason for the fairly dramatic difference in sound. It has long been a goal for any typical 2 or 3 way speaker design to ensure a smooth transition between midrange and tweeter. This results in more constant directivity and more uniform power response. This was always absent and a flaw in the Orion. While I recognized the problem (Tweeter integration), my attempt to address it by pushing the crossover higher than that of the Orion in the original NaO was of limited success, which is why I started working on the NaO Note almost immediately after the update to the NaO II. The idea of constant directivity is reasonable. But the miss in the Orion (and to a lesser, but still significant extent the NaO II) was because, IMO, SL was worried about holding constant directivity at the wrong end of the frequency scale. Constant directivity from a couple of hundred Hz up makes sense. Below that it's all room modes and dipole woofers are just a form of multiple low frequency sources. They don't really offer much benefit for modal response in the front to back direction over other formats and while they may not excite cross room modes to the same degree as monopole sources, any stereo system with symmetrically placed woofers will result in cancellation of many of those cross room modes.

If this is correct, why use dipole woofers in the Note? It would be a lot easier to use a monopole wouldn't it?

I thought the IMP was 4 full range drivers with intensity differences (depending on driver).

No, it's four 2-way in-wall speakers. From Radio Shack I think. (Never seen it, just going on memory of what I've read.)

Its designer, Gary Eickmeier, is (or was at least) a big Bose 901 fan, so I infer he wanted a speaker with a similar pattern to the 901 in the test. A long way back (think Basslist days) I talked with him about MT crossovers for the old Synchron (KEF Uni-Q knockoff) concentrics that MCM and I think PE (or A&S) sold back then. He wanted to do a "901 with tweeters" speaker at the time.